The Romance Begins

July 1, 2016

Since the day that Baba started day care, I’ve taken to driving to the train station. It is less than a mile from our house, but since I’m driving her anyway, it seems silly to go back home just to park the car. It is just as silly to drive to the station, but it means getting home 10 minutes earlier – and those 10 minutes are precious, because they are my only chance to play with Baba for a few minutes before she goes to bed.

They aren’t always the best part of my day, but I spend my afternoons looking forward to them. When the train is late and she’s melting for bed by the time I get home, I’m always hugely disappointed.

My street is near the center of town, which means that parking is often at a premium at six in the evening. And on the bad parking days, I get frustrated, because those extra minutes matter. But now that we’ve had an offer accepted on a house in a less congested part of town, that frustration has turned into daily rants, even though I once enjoyed living on such a community-minded street. It has been this way with all the little things in our house, which I loved in the way that you can only love the first place you live that’s really your own. Now, it’s maddening that the upstairs toilet takes an extra half-second to flush, because I didn’t make the chain short enough the last time I replaced it. There’s a scuff near our skylight that I used to be able to ignore, but now can’t wait to never see again. Walking down two flights of stairs to do my laundry is just impossibly aggravating, because this maybe-ours house has no basement.

Soon this won’t be a problem, I tell myself every time I encounter some new aggravation that never bothered me before. Soon this will be all behind us when we are at our new house.

We’ve been trying to be careful not to call this new house ours. Our offer was accepted so quickly that we’ve been wondering when we’ll find out some dark secret that will make the deal fall apart. It’s a lovely house, with a grand demeanor and oversized rooms with a delightful snob appeal. The front porch is welcoming and warm; it just begs for a swing and pitchers of iced tea on summer afternoons. The interior is finished enough that you’d only have to do projects that you wanted, which is a fine change from our current century-old plasterwork house. It’s on a quiet street just three blocks from the train station. The lot is oversized…and yet we can afford it.

Something seems badly wrong here. Is this still New York?

So we started stalking the house. We sneak up on it, checking to see what it’s doing at different times of the day. Does it disappear during the night? Are there ghostly lights? Was it perhaps part of the growing heroin problem in our county? It feels like it must be something, so we’re trying to dig up all the information we can. Stalking the house helps, because it gave us the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the one neighbor that we’ve seen anywhere near the house (and thank goodness for dogs and their walks). He tells us that no one has lived there since before Hurricane Sandy.

Oh, I see, we said, while congratulating ourselves on our cleverness in having already ordered our mold test. We knew the house had flooded, like most of our town. But no one living in it to pick up the mess? That’s a terrifying thought. Most of the homes in that situation now sport special red signs on them, with big warnings that it’s not safe to go inside. Almost four years later, the neighborhood wears them like pimples.

We were supposed to have our structural inspection done this week, but the owner cancelled on us last minute, which gave us all sorts of fuel for speculation. Yesterday my Beloved drove by the house and caught the owner cheating on us showing the house to someone else, which makes it pretty clear what the delay was about.

Still, a showing is not an offer. Any new offer may not be better than ours; we went in high, because we understood that we wouldn’t be the only ones to notice that this house seems like a steal. So it may end up being our house yet, without contest. But I admit that it feels very much like the beginning of a romance, when the stakes are just getting high. We feel very vulnerable as we wait, wait, wait and hope and dream that this might be The One.

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One Comment

You have the right to know about any maintenance or changes that have been done to the house, I believe. Are there any public records like contractor permits for work at that house? Any city records about whether or not the house was inspected after Sandy and found unfit for living? It seems to me you would be well within your rights to do some research in those areas in addition to what the owner tells you.